The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge

9

Net Pains

The Web is a mess, as organized as an orgy.

—David Weinberger¹

THE ARGUMENT

For the Intention Economy to emerge, the Internet needs to support maximized economic activity, driven by copious signals from individual customers and users, and responses to those by vendors. How well that happens depends on how well we understand the Net itself and its generative properties—and keep those properties alive and well.

One night not long ago, my son Jeffrey (then fourteen) and I watched Blade Runner on Netflix. Here we were, in the year 2011, watching a future noir classic about the year 2019 that was shot in 1982. We enjoyed the movie, but we couldn’t help marveling at its prophetic hits and misses.

In Blade Runner’s future, Los Angeles ...